Husson, Matthieu (Author)
Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes. Journal of medieval and humanistic studies
Issue: 27
Pages: 97-122
Jean de Murs (active ca. 1317-1345), while a master at the Faculté des Arts in Paris, wrote a text in 1321 outlining the uses of a multiplication table of two-position sexagesimal numbers. The result of this work, although it does not total more than 3500 words, has much more to teach us about medieval arithmetic in an astronomical context than we might expect at first sight. The Tabula tabularum has two particularly interesting characteristics for the historian of mathematics. First, the text is not completely smooth and one can trace the different stages of its composition in order to follow the moments of John de Murs' reasoning. Secondly, the text is intended to be a universal tool for calculation and, if it succeeds only imperfectly, it nevertheless confronts deep mathematical questions about the nature of numbers and the relations between the different arithmetical operations. These two aspects of the text allow us to analyze the heuristic and creative functions of models in medieval arithmetic.
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